About Me

Author of The Glass Character, a novel about the life and loves of silent screen comedian Harold Lloyd. Loved writing this book, love Harold! The Glass Character was published by Thistledown Press in spring 2014, and is NOW available in both paper and ebook form through Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Thistledown Press.ca, and everywhere fine books are ordered over the internet. Harold is already generating lots of excitement, and the DVD of his famous clock-dangle from Safety Last made everyone howl at the book launch. I'm also the author of two other well-received novels, Better than Life (NeWest Press, 2003) and Mallory (Turnstone Press, 2005). My (ongoing) process/spiritual biography: writer from the start. Obsessed with the word. Climbing that mountain, sliding down, climbing up again. Most gratifying quote: "Better Than Life is fiction at its finest" - Edmonton Journal

Friday, October 31, 2014

I hear things. I mean I hear noises that aren't there, or at least that nobody else can hear. I am tired of pointing them out or asking, "Can't you hear that?" because I am tired of that puzzled, pucker-browed, "are-you-off-your-nut?" look. So I keep it to myself now.

At night, I am subjected to hums. Deep hums, what I call the "doomy" sound, a low vibrating almost grinding tone on one note. It goes on and on. But wait, there's more. There's a sort of dumble-dum, bom, bom, bom, dumble-dum thing that happens too, and even a sort of searing frying electrical thing like the feeling you get before you are about to receive a powerful electric shock.

It's mostly in the house. I don't know where any of these are coming from. A small pulsating sound comes from my computer - sometimes - because when I turn it off, it stops - sometimes.

It must be coming from outside, but when I go outside, it stops. Or changes or something. Anyway, I can't hear it.

Sometimes, our neighbors give parties with loud techno-beat music, with the same sizzling searing BOM, da da da, BOM. It's a little like that, but this is all the time. I don't know if it has always been there because it's only there when I am paying attention to it, as I have been lately. It's subliminal, almost, as if some obscure god is trying to slowly drive me crazy.

It's not the fridge. I had hoped it was the fridge with a hope so fervent, it was like hoping that cute guy would notice you when you were seventeen years old and felt like a mutant. It's not the electronics downstairs, the TV or the DVR, as Bill keeps saying. He is logical, he is a scientist. Once you've eliminated everything it ISN'T, then you will come down to what it IS.

I don't know if this is inside my head, or just my excruciatingly sensitive hearing (a gift and a curse), or my ability to fasten on and focus. Whatever you focus on will increase; thus speak the sages.

So I come to my point: I am on a search to intelligently white-noise this out so I can work when it gets really bad. For some reason it is at its worst during heavy rain at night. Since it always rains heavily at night in Vancouver, I sometimes feel I am screwed. But being solution-oriented and always up for a quest, I keep on.

So for the wahwahwahwahwah, the droannnnnnnn, the dooooooooooooooooooom, the bumble-dum-dum-dum, the searing sparks, there is a small remedy. It is this music. I usually loathe this sort of thing and won't listen to it. But I went through every kind of white-sound or nature-noise recording that existed, and some of them were very nice (I was especially fond of the eight hours of continuous train sounds), but they didn't do anything for the noise. In fact, like a bee in a bottle, they sometimes paradoxically concentrated the hum or doom in the middle of my head, where it drove me even more crazy.

This is only 40 minutes or so, and there's a small break in the middle which means it's likely a 20-minute loop. During a small portion of it, there is rushing water, then it stops. I wish the rushing water were on all the time because I love rushing water (but it won't cancel the noise by itself - not even a Niagara-like waterfall). But the rest of it works for me BECAUSE it is a continuous, droning, humming buzz with some birdsounds and what sounds like a marimba picking out a small riff around that constant unvarying drone.

Tonight as I sit here, very late, too late really, I should be in bed, it's a BAM bam bam bam, BAM bam bam bam sort of thing, like trapped electricity buzzing in a very tall glass jar with straight sides. It's what a migraine would be like if a migraine were rendered into sound. It reminds me a bit of Paul McCartney's doomy BAWMbombombom BAWMbombombom bass guitar drone in the song Helter Skelter. It's evil, it's the aliens, it's the implant they stuck up my nose in 1983. They are still in contact with me and want me to act, but I won't. I MUST listen to YouTube. Must. Must. The aliens must die.

To honour an amazing day, the day I watched my first grandchild Caitlin's birth. She gave me a new life, a new self, and a reason to carry on when all seemed lost. Today she is eleven years old. We do mad scientist crafts together, baking experiments, make YouTube videos (ferociousgumby!), and have all sorts of riotous fun.

If you want to scare the shit out of yourself, listen to these. NOBODY can explain what is going on here. Scientists are saying things like, "A glacier moved". Obviously the people involved are way freaked out.

I want to write about hearing shit, I mean the shit I hear that I don't even want to hear. My hearing is so hypersensitive it's almost a joke, and lately it seems I can hear a ladybug walking up a plant stalk somewhere on the next street (while I'm sleeping). Makes no sense. I'm even using noise-cancelling YouTube videos to deal with it.

I tried to find out something about tinnitus, which I don't think it is, but was completely intimidated when I read in Wikipedia that some forms of tinnitus can be heard from outside the person's head. In other words, they are BROADCASTING the thing. Science fails us.

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

I hate office equipment.
I wish I could type inside my head, make the words float out on to the page or
even suspend themselves in mid-air like in Stephen Hall’s Raw Shark Texts. Instead
I’m left with typing, which is as awkward now as it was in the class I took in
high school. Imagine being a typing teacher all your life, trying to teach a
bunch of sullen kids a boring skill on the “qwerty” keyboard which was designed
when typewriters were first invented. The whole board was set up to slow
typists down, because the only way to correct errors back then was to spit on
the page, or cut the piece out with a scabbard.

So. The chair. My office
chair always sucks, and I’ve been through a few of them. There is always
something seriously wrong with them. For years I played musical chairs with my
husband. “This thing is made of vinyl!” I’d complain in the summer, peeling my
shorts-clad legs off the seat like Velcro. So I’d get his fabric-covered one
for a while, the one with hard plastic arms that bored holes in my elbows. The
proportions just weren’t right on this thing, so I ended up with backache and
fatigue.

Not to mention eyestrain.
Let’s get into eyestrain, shall we? Being an author, I’ve had to edit
manuscripts. Back then anyway, we used a marked-up hard copy and a computer
copy and sort of fixed one using the other. So I needed some sort of stand to
hold my papers, double-wide, and still see my monitor.

God.

I hunched and squinted as
I tried to see the damn monitor, jacked up as it was to make it just visible
while I shuffled papers. I got used to
agony in my lower back, the price of my art, perhaps. The truth is, I just
didn’t know how else to do it.

“This thing is a piece of
shit!” I’d cry in the winter, as the cold plastic froze my arms to my sides. So
once again we went through the old switcheroo.

This latest chair created
more problems. I began to slide down farther and farther on my spine, at the
same time hunching forward because I couldn’t see my monitor at all. “Why do
you do that?” my husband would ask. “I need my paper stand.” “Why?” “I
might need to use it again.” “Why?”, and so on.

Another switch of chair.
Finally, when my bizarre posture had actually given me medical problems, I
decided I needed a Brand New Chair that would fix everything. Since we’re
cheap, and since they had a nice selection at a good price, we went to Costco.
Like the Three Bears, I had to sit in each one to see which of them was “just
right”.

Amazingly, it was the
second one I sat in. Like a first-class airplane seat (and how the hell would I
know what THAT felt like? I’m guessing), it just cradled my body, but kept my
back straight. The arm rests were lavishly padded and curved to match the curve
of forearm and wrist and hand.

I! Loved! That! Chair! I loved it in the morning, I loved it in the
evening, I loved it –

Then I got it home.

My keyboard rests on a
tray that pulls out. Keeps the dust off n’ stuff (supposedly, but in reality my
keyboard is just as filthy as everyone else’s). Every time I pulled up to my
keyboard, the deluxe first-class arms of this thing pushed the tray back in.

But it got worse. The new
chair wouldn’t go down far enough. I almost felt like a little kid with her
feet dangling up off the floor. I could not believe this. “WHY WON’T IT GO
DOWN?” I screamed. “It’s as far down as it will go.” “This was designed for a
six-foot man.” “Why didn’t you notice that at the store?”

I didn’t notice ANYTHING at the store.

You don’t sit back and
lounge in an office chair. You work from it. You keyboard, you mouse,
you do stuff. You roll it forward and back. (And that’s another thing.
That big plastic mat-thingie underneath the chair just kept sliding all over
the place. The casters made dents in itthat the chair kept falling back into, and they were about a mile back
from my computer. My wrist was in agony, like a toothache. Everything
was wrong.

“So (sarcastically), do
you want another chair?”

Bastard!

He had groused and grumped
about buying a proper plastic floor mat with those little teeth in it to grip
the carpet, refusing to even consider it because it cost something like $40.
00. I kept trying to explain it to him, how the casters were cutting into the
rug. “Then pull the plastic mat back,” he said. “I’d need to do it every five
minutes.”

I like my chair, I
really do, and if I had a circular saw, one of those things with teeth all
around it, it would be no more. Right now my tray with my keyboard on it has a
shelf sitting on top if it, an old shelf left over from one of those really
tacky particle-board book cases. My monitor has one under it too, to jack it up
at least an inch to make up for the fact that the chair is too high up and
can’t be fixed.

Now I am nagging him to
PLEASE let me get a proper mat so the thing won’t slither and slide all over
hell’s-half-acre like Bambi on ice. He gets this squinched-up, disapproving
look on his face (I can read his mind: “God, what a waste of money”), doesn’t
even make eye contact with me because I know he does not understand my needs.

He complains all the time
that I spend too much time at the computer. I have this little habit of
writing. In my entire life, I have had maybe two people understand what I do,
and my husband is not one of them. He thinks I play at it. Everyone thinks
I play at it, that I pretend and delude myself that I’m “doing something”. So
how can my back hurt, I wonder? If it isn’t even “work”? And why won’t I come
out of that room and go to Costco with him to look at bulk sausages and stuff?

To all but those two
people, ANYTHING would be better than doing what I do, the waste of time. Even
having books out is futile, isn’t it? Some sort of Hemingway fantasy? (And
didn’t Hemingway end up shooting himself in the head?). Why do you need a
special chair, for God’s sake, and a plastic floor mat with little
dit-dots on it so the chair won’t buck and heave under you like a wild horse?

I threw my keyboard at
the wall once, so that the underside is secured with masking tape. I have
slammed innumerable mice, and thrown a few, which is satisfying because the
cover pops off and the battery goes flying across the room. I can’t throw a
chair, can’t lift the thing, would like to throw a husband but he is rooted seventeen
feet into the ground. Not getting it. While I sit there mousing and hurting.
Mousing and hurting.

Postlog. This is something I wrote a long time ago, for That Other Blog, Open Salon, which I didn't really know how to do. I didn't realize you had to "like" people's stuff (usually without reading it) so that they would "like" yours (usually without reading it). It got worse and worse. I didn't need junior high all over again, though it surprises me how often I have to relive it. Then someone dissed me in a high-and-mighty fashion for using a photo of Sylvia Plath without writing to her estate for permission to use it. This photo had been blogged and reblogged hundreds, if not thousands of times, but then these two women, chittidy-chattidy, yatter yatter yatter, we're in and you're not, finally drove me out. When I said I thought the photo was in the public domain, one of the bitches said, "I'm speechless." They simply could not believe what a yokel, what an uneducated idiot they had in their midst.I set this blog up on a whim and haven't changed it much, though most blogs are sleeker and look more sophisticated. I hate sleek and sophisticated. I like simple blogs with lots of pictures, because part of me never left kindergarten. I was a lot happier then. My happiest time was when I was ten and in a special class and we ran riot and gave our teacher a breakdown. For once in my life, someone called me "smart" and even acknowledged it. It wasn't to last, for the biddies of mediocrity would ultimately close in, as they always do.I don't even have this font any more, isn't it wild?

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Ahhhhhh. . . such flavour. Such an ecstasy of sensual pleasure. TV advertising was new then, and the mad men of Madison Ave. were exploring the potential of the moving image. No longer did they have to limit themselves to glossy still pictures.

Back then, it was all good. Nothing was "bad for you". Later in the decade came the ads, tinged with a little desperation, describing how "mild" the cigarettes were, how easy on the throat, even claiming that doctors recommended certain brands. Which they probably did.

I don't know what this creep is selling, but I wish he'd go away. I think it's a lead-in to an ad presented by the host of a very early TV show, perhaps from the late 1940s. TV ws remarkable then. I even found a show where two men stood in front of enormous microphones and read off of sheafs of paper.

Incomprehensible that these cops would break up a couple for innocently kissing on a bench, then hand them cancer-inducing tubes of tobacco. More socially-acceptable, I guess. Put a smile in your smoking! And note the flamboyant way everyone seems to blow out their smoke. Why?

This woman cleans her breath and guards her teeth by rubbing her finger on them. And I love that MISSING MISSING MISSING part.

Garrrrr-dollllll.

A woman facially masturbating with a cake of soap.

The Cancer Ballet. Can you hear the coughing, can you see the black lungs and congested hearts? Obviously, they couldn't.